When higher energy costs hit home

You check the mailbox: a few advertisements, some ‘too good to be true’ offers, and bills. There’s your mortgage, your car payment, your electricity bill and maybe your home heating bill. Which ones have been causing you to wince lately when you open them? Chances are the last two.

What you may not realize when you slide your finger under the envelope flap is the relationship between the numbers in those bills and a significant debate that is taking place on our energy future. How things like pipelines and transmission lines, fossil fuels and renewable resources, trickle down over time to the line that reads “amount due.”

Energy analysts and policy makers have been talking all winter about constrained natural gas pipelines, over-dependence on natural gas and the region’s high energy prices. We saw this week the affect these issues have on the people who live and work in New England.

ISO-NE President and CEO Gordon van Welie, speaking recently in Washington, D.C., said the region will be in a “precarious operating position” in the next three to four years, and that the energy problems New England faced this winter will only get worse next winter because more power plants are retiring this year.

It’s clear that adding more energy from a variety of sources to the regional grid will lower costs and ensure reliability. All six New England governors have acknowledged the importance of Canadian hydropower in a well-rounded energy mix, as did the Boston Sunday Globe last weekend when it endorsed Massachusetts legislation that would encourage the importation of more hydropower into our regional power grid. Northern Pass is already years ahead of whatever new proposals might now emerge, with a secured route and a federally-approved funding plan. It’s a project well positioned to help the region address these energy challenges.